It’s been about six weeks since we installed our new hives at our house upstate by the Hudson and we decided it was a good time to see how they were doing. (Though we had peeked in after the first two weeks, just to make sure that the queens had safely gotten out of their little boxes and were busy laying eggs.) From the moment the two boxes of bees arrived, one of them seemed to be a bit more lively than the other, and that still holds true a month and half later. The “pink” hive has not progressed nearly as much as the “blue” hive. Rather than branching out and filling all the files, the pink hive has concentrated their efforts in the middle, between two frames that had a bit more space between then than the rest. We didn’t even pull it out to look at it because it would have broken its structure. The blue hive is totally cranking. They have nearly filled the entire base box and we gave them a second tier so they could expand. The base hive is where the queen remains, any tiers that get filled above it is where you can draw honey from.

In this photo, above, you can see how some of the cells are getting capped off. When all the frames are completely full and capped off, the bees will move to the next level. Because the queen will stay on the first level, there will be no eggs or baby bees on the second level. It’s all honey, honey, honey.

To help give our little honey bees a little boost, we filled a large dog water dispenser with sugar water (2lbs of sugar). We placed sponges in the base container so they wouldn’t drown. They really seem to be enjoying it, swarming around it all day.

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